2018 has been another banner year for the horror genre. A Quiet Place cleaned up at the box office to become one of the most successful non-franchise films of the year. Hereditary took everyone by surprise and has become a word of mouth hit. Get Out took home an Oscar. Stephen King published a new book, The Outsider, and Castle Rock, an entire TV series based in his universe, is now available to stream on Hulu. Movies like The Meg and Suspiria and The Nun and a brand new Halloween will hit theaters in the coming months. It remains, in short, a great time to be a horror fan.
Earlier this year, a horror film was released without a ton of fanfare, proving divisive among audiences and rarely mentioned in discussions about what a good year it has been for the genre. That movie is The Strangers: Prey at Night, directed by Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down). It did decent box office — $30 million on a budget of $5 million – but that’s less than half of what the original The Strangers made in 2008. With a “C” Cinemascore and a 38% on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s not a movie that was warmly embraced by either audiences or critics, who accused it of placing style over substance and showcasing unlikable characters making bad decisions.
But even those horror fans who summarily dismissed The Strangers: Prey at Night altogether have found common ground on one aspect of the movie: the swimming pool scene is the standout. I’ll take it even further than that: not only is the swimming pool sequence the best in the movie, but it also ranks among the best horror scenes in any movie period.
Spoilers for The Strangers: Prey at Night from here on…
The scene in question arrives exactly one hour into the movie. Teenagers Kinsey (Bailee Madison) and Luke (Lewis Pullman) are the only surviving members of their family, their parents (Christina Hendricks and Martin Henderson) having been murdered by a group of masked strangers terrorizing them without apparent reason. Luke walks out onto the deck of the swimming pool at the trailer park and is confronted by two of the strangers: first one of the women and then the man. The staging and the outcomes of both fights highlight just what makes The Strangers: Prey at Night special, all within the framework of a tense and gorgeously constructed set piece.
Like the rest of the movie, the lighting and color saturation of the pool sequence are heavily stylized, with cinematographer Ryan Samul giving the entire film a candy-colored aesthetic designed to evoke the 1980s cinema from which Prey at Night draws its influences. The sequence at 1:00 is easily the movie’s most gorgeous, though, bathed in the neon glow of several gaudy palm tree lights and the cool blue reflection of a heavily chlorinated swimming pool. Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” blares over the speakers throughout the scene, but it’s never used wink-wink ironically or to contrast what’s happening on screen in a way that undercuts the intensity. If anything, its use only enhances the intensity because of when and how Roberts chooses to have the song drop in and out. It’s never on the obvious crescendos, never when you might expect, and by keeping the viewer off balance even in that small way, the pool sequence ratchets up the tension and destroys the potential for predictability. Nothing in the scene happens quite the way we expect.
Luke wanders out onto the pool deck in a wide shot, Roberts’ and Samul’s 2.35:1 widescreen composition creating a mostly empty frame – lots of negative space in which a killer could surprisingly appear. And appear a killer does: from behind Luke, the masked female runs into the frame to spring her attack. Rather than chopping the beat up into a bunch of quick cuts and noisy music stings to create a jump scare, Roberts plays it out in a single take. We know more than the character on screen, if only for a few seconds. The camera zooms in quickly, closing the space both between Luke and his attacker and between the audience and the action on screen. We’re a part of this now. We must bear witness.
Acting quickly, Luke turns and hits the Stranger, knocking her to the ground unconscious. It’s at this point that he does something I’ve wanted to see a character in a slasher movie do pretty much every time I’ve sat down to watch a slasher movie: stab first, ask questions later. Rather than allowing his assailant to escape or, in the words of Randy Meeks, pop up for one last scare, Luke makes a series of smart choices. He pulls the knife away from the girl’s hand. He starts to pull the mask up to learn her identity. And when her eyes open, suggesting she’s still ready to attack, Luke takes her knife and repeatedly stabs her in the chest. It’s brutal, yes, but it’s smart. Better yet, it’s survival. Slasher movie characters are so rarely willing to go to this place until maybe the final moments of the film that to see someone act this swiftly and decisively only an hour in is totally refreshing and lets us know that Prey at Night isn’t governed by the usual rules of horror movies. We are consistently kept off balance.
The male Stranger appears, swinging an axe at Luke (who taunts his assailant, shouting “I killed one of yours! How does that feel?”). They fall into the pool, fighting both below and above the surface of the water. The way the camera glides between the two is brilliant: not only does aforementioned song dropping in and out have a disorienting effect, but the dichotomy between the candy-colored, pop-drenched world above ground and the violent nightmare taking place underwater speaks directly to The Strangers: Prey at Night’s theme of the random ugliness that exists below its slick, gorgeous surfaces. The movie has been accused of being all style and no substance, but the pool scene demonstrates that the style is the substance.
As Luke tries to run away through the pool, the Stranger catches up to him and stabs him in the back. Suddenly, the intensity of the last two minutes slows down and reality floods back in as Luke falls back into the water, a red cloud forming around him as the blood leaves his body, polluting the water the way the Strangers have polluted this family. It’s at this point that Roberts finally allows the pop song and the images to sync up somewhat, as “Total Eclipse of the Heart” finally decrescendos into the haunting final chorus, just Bonnie Tyler and a piano. Things are winding down for the song and for Luke, the movie tells us, as Roberts’ camera holds on the boy’s face trying to hold himself above water, gulping for air like a fish left on the sidewalk. Slasher movie deaths aren’t traditionally this sad. We know the characters are going to die. It’s why we buy our ticket. But watching the life drain out of Luke – moments ago so full of fight – as Bonnie Tyler laments that now she’s only falling apart is surprisingly moving. It’s not just that we know Luke or that he’s young. It’s that 90 seconds earlier he was a survivor, and now his fight means nothing. The scene takes us from terror to triumph to tragedy in a matter of minutes.
The biggest drawback to the pool scene is that the rest of The Strangers: Prey at Night never really lives up to its heights, meaning the movie that follows plays out in its shadow. It doesn’t matter, though, for two reasons: 1) the rest of the movie is still solid and 2) most horror films wish they had just one sequence as good as this one. Five or ten years from now when audiences have moved on and many of 2018’s horror films have been forgotten, people are still going to be talking about Prey at Night specifically for the pool scene and possibly never hearing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” the same way again. No small feat, that.
In its own way, the pool scene turns The Strangers: Prey at Night from another forgotten sequel into a kind of classic.
